Sooner or later, you may need to assign the contents of one
zval container to another. This is easier said than
done, since the zval container doesn't contain only
type information, but also references to places in Zend's internal
data. For example, depending on their size, arrays and objects may
be nested with lots of hash table entries. By assigning one
zval to another, you avoid duplicating the hash
table entries, using only a reference to them (at most).

To copy this complex kind of data, use the copy
constructor. Copy constructors are typically defined in
languages that support operator overloading, with the express
purpose of copying complex types. If you define an object in such a
language, you have the possibility of overloading the "=" operator,
which is usually responsible for assigning the contents of the
lvalue (result of the evaluation of the left side of the operator)
to the rvalue (same for the right side).

Overloading means assigning a different
meaning to this operator, and is usually used to assign a function
call to an operator. Whenever this operator would be used on such
an object in a program, this function would be called with the
lvalue and rvalue as parameters. Equipped with that information, it
can perform the operation it intends the "=" operator to have
(usually an extended form of copying).

This same form of "extended copying" is also necessary for PHP's
zval containers. Again, in the case of an array,
this extended copying would imply re-creation of all hash table
entries relating to this array. For strings, proper memory
allocation would have to be assured, and so on.

Zend ships with such a function,
called zend_copy_ctor() (the previous PHP equivalent
was pval_copy_constructor()).

A most useful demonstration is a function that accepts a complex type as
argument, modifies it, and then returns the argument:

The first part of the function is plain-vanilla argument retrieval.
After the (left out) modifications, however, it gets interesting:
The container of parameter is assigned to the
(predefined) return_value container. Now, in order
to effectively duplicate its contents, the copy constructor is
called. The copy constructor works directly with the supplied
argument, and the standard return values are
FAILURE on failure and
SUCCESS on success.

If you omit the call to the copy constructor in this example, both
parameter and return_value would
point to the same internal data, meaning that
return_value would be an illegal additional
reference to the same data structures. Whenever changes occurred in
the data that parameter points to,
return_value might be affected. Thus, in order to
create separate copies, the copy constructor must be used.

The copy constructor's counterpart in the Zend API, the destructor
zval_dtor(), does the opposite of the
constructor.